Until last year, no-one else's choreography had figured in the repertoire, but company member Martin Lawrance's Grey Allegro looked so good on the dancers that Alston programmed it into the autumn tour.

The company is preparing to mark the milestone with a nationwide tour ... The show will feature two new pieces, "Gypsy Mixture" and "Such Longing" alongside reworked versions of "Fever" and "Shimmer" and "Charge", an ensemble piece by company dancer Martin Lawrence. With influences and music ranging from gypsy folk rhythms to Monteverdi, and from Vivienne Westwood to Chopin, audiences can expect a heady sensual mixture combined with Alston's trademark innovative choreography.

The programme for this spring tour, rapturously received at Nottingham Playhouse, starts with Shimmer, a haunting piece danced to movements from Ravel’s Sonatine and Miroirs, played live on grand piano by Jason Ridgway. The subtle interaction of the three pairs of dancers is sometimes desolate, sometimes rhapsodic and their web-like costume adds to the elusive quality of the piece.

Martin Lawrance and Silvestre Sanchez Strattner display perfect synchronicity in New Ground, an acrobatic piece danced to the two muted violins of a Romanian folk song.

His [pianist Jason Ridgeway's] ability to transmit the physical pleasure of fingering the notes and to project and place the sound in space combines with Alston's choreography to create one of the most visceral experiences of Chopin on stage.

Richard Alston is another form of the real thing, a maker of dances to music, celebrating his company's tenth anniversary. His dancers let their bodies do the talking, relying on bursts of stillness to punctuate their lyrical, long-drawn phrases.

In the Nineties he launched his own-name label, and it's hard to get very excited about the news that this current vehicle is now 10 years old. New dances have been pouring out of Richard Alston for half a lifetime.

Alston's dances are full of lovely steps, but they can be too polite: elegantly crafted rather than gripping. Then he gets caught up in his music, and the dancing glows, suddenly vivid and spontaneous.

Alston has revised his Fever, which explores the sensual ideas and equally sensual sonorities of Monteverdi madrigals... Love accepted, love rejected and love resolved are the under-pinning of the dance, and duets and groupings are seen in beguiling golden light.

The Richard Alston Dance Company is on superb form for its current tour, which marks the troupe’s 10th anniversary. The programme I saw, along with a highly enthusiastic audience of all ages at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, ranks as one of Alston’s best.

His newest work, Such Longing, pays homage to a modern classic, Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, setting a series of eloquent dances to nocturnes and études by Chopin, played on stage, exquisitely, by Jason Ridgway.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum